War on Drugs (cont'd)...

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Dave B,

It tough to argue against legalizing victimless crime. The last thing I want is to tell someone how to live even if I think its bad for them. Its their body its their business.

I know drug abuse hurts more than the user. Where our opinions differ is that I believe it hurts themselves, their families, and harms society. I don't believe its a victimless crime.

Shok
 
Excellent contributions, Shok!

I had never heard about htat experiment in Switzerland.. but combining that with the points that Munro made about the nature of drug abusers and I think you have a pretty nasty picture of what making pot and heroin as accessible as alcohol would do!

------------------
-Essayons
 
It's a good thing that a fine, upstanding civilization like ours hasn't a history of addiction to things like tobacco (late 17th century on), alcohol (late 17th century on), opium and morphine (late 18th century), ether (late 18th century), cocaine (late 18th century thru early 19th century), etc.

Ales and mead predate writing.

Munro, I believe you've the paradigmatic cart in front of the proverbial horse. The erosion of classic values in this country in the 1960s was based on the following cornerstones;
- the New Deal, and the shift to crypto-socialism;
- McCarthyism and the destruction of rational discourse;
- the failure of conservatives and mainstream America to address very real civil rights issues during the 1950s;
- the leftwards swing of almost all mainstream media outlets and academia.
These all predated the rise of the "drug culture." The drug problem is the symptom, not the disease. Take the drugs away from drug-addled people, and most of them are still addled; look at the absurd number of high school graduates who can barely read or do arithmetic. The bottom line is that we live in a society in which incompetence is all too often tolerated, and excellence all too often punished. In the long run, the behavior you get is the behavior that is promoted by your carrots and sticks.

Shok; having one's sister marry "trailer trash" tends to cause damage to one's sister as well as other family members. Should she be arrested at the alter?

Look; drug usage is bad. Lots of things are bad. Should we be letting violent criminals out of prison early to make room for drug users who are faced with "mandatory minimums" for possession? Here's my approach;
- put true addicts in the state hospital for treatment
- put dealers in the city jail for short sentences
- ignore possession busts and stop this whole random search thing
- treat DUI for drugs harshly
- focus on violent crimes.
But overall, if we want our citizens to behave as adults, our government and culture will have to start treating citizens as adults. Not bloody likely, unfortunately.
 
NY Times had an article today that growing dope has become a billion dollar business in
Tenn. replacing moonshine.

When one state pumps out that much grass,
the war on marijuana at least, is a figment of someone's imagination.

Maybe legal drugs isn't that wonderful an idea but what we have now isn't working and is
destructive to society.
 
We prohibited alcohol and created a black market, which corrupted the police and politicians and started the first bout of drive by shootings to terrorize America.

Now drug prohibition supports a virulent black market. We nevertheless face a progressive march toward the prohibition of guns and tobacco. Already the Radical Prohibitionists have announced plans to tax, label or restrict a great variety of objects and substances.

Right now a prenatal black market is forming in the Indian cigarette trade.

The very idea of prohibition is flawed. Prohibition only works when nobody really cares about the thing to be prohibited. Otherwise, a black market is created and more crime, corruption and violence will follow as naturally as the explosion which follows dropping a match in a barrel of gunpowder.

Bentley

"All restraints upon man's natural liberty, not necessary for the simple maintenance of justice, are of the nature of slavery, and differ from each other only in degree."
-- Lysander Spooner, "Trial by Jury"
 
Battler, the mafia did not come to an end because of prohibition. They still had extortion, prostitution, gambling, narcotics, loan-sharking, truck hijacking, and labor union control (or union influence). Up until Sammy the Bull Gravano ratted out John Gotti, The New York mob ran the building trades and construction workers and garbage haulers and cement truck drivers and New Jersey casino workers unions. Hell, they probably still have some influence, even after the Gotti bust.

One other thing, someone mentioned testing drug users for DUI offenses. I think that's great, but that would mean that marijuana users could never drive. Marijuana remains in the body for weeks at a time. I think legalization is something to think about implementing but I worry about some doped up moron crossing the center-line on the highway and hitting my car head-on.

Also, the cost of treating all the idiots who become drug addicts would be astronomical. Probably in the billions of dollars. When you talk about saving money by abandoning the War on Drugs, I feel that most of the alleged savings will be spent on treating addicts.
 
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Agent Orange:
Also, the cost of treating all the idiots who become drug addicts would be astronomical. Probably in the billions of dollars. When you talk about saving money by abandoning the War on Drugs, I feel that most of the alleged savings will be spent on treating addicts.[/quote]

Don't I recall this same argument being made against abandoning Prohibition? "Make liquor legal again, and everyone will become alcoholics." Yet somehow we survived -- perhaps because personalities prone to addictions aren't dissuaded by laws?
 
Agent Orange, I'm no expert on the matter, but wouldn't blood or urine tests provide a level just like BAC? And that level fade over time, as the body processes and removes it? With minimal research, some sort of threshold level could be set.

And we're now dodging those doped-up drivers anyway, along with drunks.

One thing that's always bothered me about the drug thing is the issue of "intent" versus "outcome." In the U.S., we have far to willing to allow the legislature to define "intent" by fiat, which is fundamentally wrong if you think about it. The government should not be in the business of trying to punish people for what it *assumes* they are thinking of doing. I realize that LEOs and prosecutors will claim that without those kinds of laws, many criminals would be very hard to catch. But that's the contradiction; the government punishes people for not following the law, while the legislature and executive branches (and increasingly, the judicial branch) fail to respect the Constitution.

There are no easy answers on this issue, and it is going to take a lot of effort to make an improvement. But it is clear that the current approach isn't working.
 
Ivanhoe,
I'll agree that before the leftist takeover of the universities, media, and executive dopesters and other perverts were extremely uncommon, on the fringe margins of society. In the Sixties street politics gibberish was enthusiastically promoted by leftists and others. Dope and radical politics became symbiotic.

Nowadays Sixties rhetoric has become institutionalized, as well as drug abuse the likes of which would make even the most hardened laudanum addict a hundred and forty years back shudder.

Our war on drugs is being handled the same way the Viet Nam war was handled: the crisis is created by the intellectual forces charged with solving it in a manner designed to fail. This way we can all wring our hands in despair, or, numbed to the point of indifference, just change the channel on TV when yet another disaster is broadcast.

The only folks who benefit are those forces opposed to the qualities and values which made America the only viable alternative to arbitrary authority in human history: sobriety, rationality, morality, self-discipline, and personal responsibility. Drug use destroys these qualities.
Drug use and the attitudes which tolerate it is now prevalent. The virtues they destroy are now seen as oppressive attitudes to alternate lifestyles.
barf.gif
:mad:

There is no "war on drugs." Like Viet Nam, there is a cynical policy to discredit the USA and the root and branch of liberty.

Until dopers and hop-heads are ostracized, like they were when drugs were legal, and looked upon as morally depraved and a menace to society, the "drug war" is doomed to fail, but that's what it's all about any way.

Look for things to get much, much worse in the next ten years.




[This message has been edited by Munro Williams (edited June 05, 2000).]
 
OK, Shok, but where do you draw the line?

My own opinion is that tobacco, fatty foods, too much tequila, and motorcycle riding (esp. without a helmet) are dangerous, and have the potential to harm the user, his family, and society. How do we decide what to control, and what to allow?

Is it possible that most drugs are really no more harmful (as measured by the cost to society) than alcohol? If so, then what are we doing?????

Here's my disclaimer: I don't do drugs (except Scotch and Adreneline). I hope and pray that my kids won't do drugs. However, I know in my soul that it's my and my family's responsibility, not society's, to try to mold my kids' behavior. If they try drugs, as I did a long time ago, I trust them to walk away from them as I did, with their curiosity satisfied.

Everybody is somebody's kid. How would you feel if the courts put your child away for 5-10 years for doing what you, and virtually everybody else your age, did once upon a time (And haven't even wanted to do again for 20 years)??

db
 
I was listening the the G-Man (G. Gordon Liddy has a talk radio show) whilst driving to lunch, and he was talking to an author of a book titled something like "Ritalin Nation." The gist of the guy's work is that Ritalin is very cocaine-like in its psychogenic properties, and we have an entire generation of kids who have been doped up with the stuff by the heavy hand of the school systems (allied with the manufacturer, no doubt). One upshot is that kids who have been on Ritalin for long periods are *very* susceptable to substance abuse and addiction.

If this guy's stuff is correct, then this has got to be a much greater problem than any other aspect of the drug issue. We will have LARGE numbers of people who will be close to the ragged edge and not even know it. And we're not talking "recreational use," we're talking compulsive, addictive behavior. I've been very concerned about the whole Ritalin thing, and now I'm damn sure that Ritalin and related drugs have been, on the whole, a disaster for the country. And it sounds like it will get worse.
 
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